The Book of Abraham

There are many reasons beyond simply looking at the text that makes the historical accuracy and the validity of Abraham having written the book with his own hand of the Book of Abraham questionable to say the least. For example, the facsimiles that Joseph Smith includes in the book were incomplete to begin with and he filled them in with his own imagination. Furthermore, the hieroglyphics that he claims to have translated never mention Abraham's name and the story that the hieroglyphics actually tell are not even close to what Joseph Smith came up with.

Many Biblical scholars believe that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible which contains the Genesis story of creation that is recounted in this translation of the supposed works of Abraham. It seems that every translation by Joseph Smith contains a large amount of text that is the exact same as it appears in the Bible perhaps with very subtle changes to fit Joseph Smith's fancy, which seems suspicious to me. Sure stories could have been passed down through the ages but, once again, that they were written in exactly the same phrasing is unlikely. Moses lived 500 years after Abraham. Now it is plausible that Abraham could have written about the creation if it was revealed to him and then passed the story on to Moses who compiled it with other stories to be written in Genesis. So this alone does not suggest that this story was not written in 2000BC.

With a little research it is clear that Joseph Smith used a few anachronisms that would not have been around at the time of Abraham (http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/pearl/abraham/sci_list.html). Such anachronisms include Potiphar's Hill, Chaldeans and calling the King of Egypt Pharaoh. But perhaps Joseph Smith just used the modern day translation, or what Abraham would have been referring to but using the now-common terms for it. Although these anachronisms do weaken the Book of Abraham's argument for validity. It also seems a little bit of a stretch that the Urim and the Thummim that Joseph Smith uses is also used by Abraham nearly 4000 years earlier in a land far away. It is by looking at the text in it's context, or the context that it was allegedly written in and finding anachronisms or things that are known to not have been known or talked about or discovered at the time of the alleged original writing that one can find evidence of the falsehood of authorship in a writing such as this.